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1 



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The 

NEIV ENGLAND TOWN 

Its SPIRIT and MEANING 

With some REFERENCE to MODERN SOCIAL and 
ECONOMIC QUESTIONS. 



By Jacoh L. Greene. 



I 



^n ADDRESS 

Delivered at WATERFORD, MAINE, September 3^, 1897, 
at the looth ANNIVERSARY of the INCORPORA- 
TION of the TOWN. 



The Case, Lockwood & Brainard Co., Printers^ H .k.tford. Conn. 

MDCCCXCVII. 



THE NEIV ENGLAND TOIVN 






JSU 
CI 



. 6 G c C • ( 



ADDRESS. 

THE first privilege and the dearest delight of 
the home-returning one, is to salute them 
of his household ; to give each dear mem- 
ber of the circle, which is his and whose he is, 
the greeting that wells from his heart as waters 
from full-fed springs ; to give and to take again, 
by the speech of eye, lip, and hand, the pledge of 
a love that among all distractions never forgets, 
and through all the stress of life never grows 
cold ; to renew the sense of his unity with them 
whose lives make with his one full chord in the 
great human harmony; to be and to feel one's 
self to be again at home, among his very own. 
And so we who have wandered outward, it may 
be far and long, turn with glad thankfulness to 
you who have kept the household fires the while, 
that your love has not forgotten us, and that your 
voices have called us back to be counted yet 
again in the census of our mother's children, on 
this day when she recollects all her own even 
from the beginning, and to stand again with you 
in the shelter of a father's house, undivided in 



heart, witnessing together our common birth- 
right. 

But as we, responding to your gladly heard 
call, stand here among our native hills, whose 
sweet airs we first breathed and whose bird songs 
were the first we knew, amid the scenes where 
life was shaped and its first inspirations drawn, 
among our own dear people and near the many 
graves of others once and yet our own, our eyes 
and our hearts go searching for the faces that 
smiled on us long years ago, and we realize how 
many of them are dust ; how many of those who 
made the past for us of that day have gone on to 
the great communion of saints. On this day 
dedicate to the historic memories of our dear 
home, our hearts go out with tender yearnings to 
those who made it home to us, who here made 
our joys, helped our hopes, smoothed our diffi- 
culties, and shared our griefs; who made and 
kept here in simple truth and steadfastness those 
institutions of religion, learning, and freedom 
under equal law which give to life all its due 
opportunities to work out for itself its divine 
significance and intent. And our recollecting 
love takes account of those of our mother's many 
sons whose graves in earth and sea are not with 
us ; who heard their call for life elsewhere, and 



sleep where their night fell ; some after the full- 
ness of days in the good works of peace, well 
wrought ; some who dared meet death on stricken 
fields for freedom and for country, for truth and 
righteousness' sake. How many are the names 
each heart recalls, how tender and how proud are 
the memories that enshrine them, how prayerful 
the love that clings to and follows them. May the 
blessed light perpetual shine on them. Whether 
they were to us father or mother, brother or 
sister, lover or friend, we who meet to take a 
reverent, thankful, backward look over a cen- 
tury's rounded tale of years, greet each other in 
loving consciousness of them, drawn to them as 
they still, please God, to us, "by the cords of 
a man ;" by that deathless affection which binds 
unbrokenly the life that was and the life that is, 
to the life which, for us, is to come, and which for 
them has already dawned. And so we stand with 
them to-day, an unsundered host, before the God 
of our fathers in all their generations, while we 
recount what He hath wrought here where true 
and brave men and tender and patient women 
have toiled and spared not in His name ; one 
with them in that deep and mystical, personal 
sense of which historic association and continuity 
are but phases and necessary incidents. 



It is one of the sure marks of the divine in man, 
that he is always searching the divine mysteries, 
always seeking to understand the divine econo- 
mies, the ways of God among men, and the opera- 
tion of His methods with men. And we shall 
but follow a true instinct if from this great divid- 
ing point of time we look out broadly over the 
past life of our town with the purpose to see what 
has here been going on which is an essential and 
integral part of the world's progress, which has 
made life here a part of the world's rising life, 
and to learn those lessons of the past which are 
the hopes of the future repeating, in whatever new 
detail, the true life of the past. And to under- 
stand ourselves, we must also understand all that 
of which we are but a part ; we must understand 
the significance of the type of which we are an 
example. If, as our fathers believed, and as we 
may, upon many equal and further proofs, also 
believe, the institutions of just and stable govern- 
ment, of freedom joined to responsibility, of equal 
laws and righteous order among men, are among 
the great instrumentalities which God is using in 
the slow forward progress and the gradual upward 
lift of the peoples of the whole earth, it is well for 
us, among the first acts of this day, and before we 
pass on to the interesting details of AVaterford's 



history since it became a distinct and complete 
self-governing unit in the political structure of 
the state, to recall for a little what, in spirit and ' 
in practical operation and effect, the New Eng- 
land town is ; what it signifies as an index of the 
spirit and purpose of those who made it, and as a 
reacting influence upon its makers ; what it means 
as a factor in present tendency ; what it stands 
for politically, intellectually, morally, industrially, 
and institutionally. For while the town is pri- 
marily and always a political organism, the polit- 
ical setting of life has such a clear and constant 
relation to all the objects and purposes of life, 
and to the methods by which they are pursued, 
that it is really an indistinguishable part of that life. 
It is the permanent condition within which life is 
lived, and furnishes in part both its constant in- 
spiration and its limitations. The great and the 
ultimate phenomenon in human life is character. 
From it every human effort takes both energy 
and direction, and to it, in turn, contributes its 
developing influence. We are, therefore, to study 
every human institution in the light of that great 
fact ; we are to consider it both as a product of 
character in those who framed it, and as a pro- 
ducer of character, and so a factor of destiny, in 
those who inherit it in full operation. / 



Without going into tedious historical detail, it 
may be said that the political institution known to 
us in its developed form as town government 
was, in its germ, the creation of men who well un- 
derstood, or at least had the sure instinct, that po- 
litical freedom is the necessary condition to and 
defense of intellectual, moral, spiritual, and indus- 
trial freedom. It was the work of men with a 
sense of both personal and collective responsibil- 
ity ; of men who realized that the possession of 
capacity and power meant accountability for their 
use ; and that as capacity and power are individ- 
ual possessions, and their exercise is an individual 
act, so is the responsibility individual ; that as the 
necessary converse of this fundamental truth, the 
individual on whom responsibility rests must have 
a firm guarantee of such freedom of action as en- 
ables him truly and fully to carry his own burden 
to the account : a freedom limited only by the 
condition that it shall harm no one. And that 
guarantee of true and full personal freedom of 
each, balanced by due regard to the good of the 
whole, can exist only in the equal share of each in 
the political control and collective administration 
of those things which are the equal concern of 
all : the common weal. To those men the first 
conception, however indistinct, was that of duty 



to be done ; and their conception of human right 
was rooted and grounded in the purpose and the 
effort to do that duty. Freedom was the right of 
men who sought duty and how to do it. It is 
never out of season for us to remember that the 
question of human rights can never arise except 
out of an intention to do a duty. The rights of 
man do not necessarily attach to mere existence. 
They inhere only in the power and the purpose to 
do ; they presuppose a life intent upon its normal 
action. And it is well, on the other hand, even in 
our day, to consider how complete, under that 
high ideal, that freedom must needs be, save as it 
clashes with the same righteous freedom of other 
men. It must be physical or the man cannot act ; 
and the man who cannot act has no duty and no 
responsibility. It must be intellectual ; only the 
free mind can see and follow the light. It must be 
spiritual ; only the free spirit can know and rightly 
obey its rightful Lord. It must be moral ; only 
he who is free to choose can be held accountable 
for his motive and his deed. It must be political ; 
for only so can every other form of freedom be as- 
sured. And so always and everywhere the strug- 
gles of mankind for intellectual and spiritual free- 
dom have been accompanied by, or have had their 
outcome in, the endeavor to conquer political 



freedom as the means and safeguard of all the 
rest. 

Along with the sense of power and duty, of 
ability and responsibility, which demanded free- 
dom as the necessary condition for the exercise of 
the one and for the fulfillment of the other, went 
another urgent conception or instinct which lies at 
the root of all true manliness and dignity in char- 
acter, whether as regards one's proper self-re- 
spect, or true, considerate charity toward others : 
the instinct of self-help ; the sense that he to 
whom God has given power and ability and dis- 
cernment, and whom, so equipped. He has set in 
the midst of opportunity for their exercise, is 
thereby to win his way for himself ; to develop 
and mature all the powers of his manhood and 
gain his divinely intended stature by fighting his 
battle for himself, and not to let them go to feeble 
waste and deadness by casting himself helpless on 
the care of others. Their conception of a man 
was that of one equipped with every necessary 
faculty and power, self-centered, self-poised, ad- 
dressing himself to life purposeful, alert, inde- 
pendent, knowing no limit to his endeavor but 
the rights of others and no rightful lord but Him 
who made him. Such men needed and deserved 
freedom ; that stable freedom of one equal and 

8 



righteous law for all, that gives to each his due 
and full opportunity, and to each his perfect pro- 
tection therein against every and all other. 

Of such freedom for each and such safety for all, 
the self-government of free men in the township 
organization is a root institution. By some name 
and definitive form it will remain so long as free- 
dom endures. Complete local self-government 
was the purpose, and free, open discussion, neigh- 
bor meeting neighbor on the level of equal right 
and equal power in the matters of common con- 
cern, was the root method of that institution. 
That primitive political institution and method, 
with all its included ideas and conceptions in full 
and vigorous holding, the Anglo-Saxon fathers of 
New England, and of our own Puritan town, 
brought and planted here. And it was not only 
the expression of their conception of political life, 
it was a method which expressed the habit of 
their minds in dealing with all affairs. Far as we 
can trace back into the mists of early history, our 
simple-hearted, sturdy Saxon ancestors, among 
the deep forests of northern Europe, or on the 
shores of its wild seas, practiced in some form the 
essential method of to-day ; and they gradually 
developed its application to all matters, to the 
public concerns of religion as well as of state ; 



and the great historic reformations, and Protes- 
tantism itself, are but the result of that recog- 
nition of the equal responsibility of each freeman 
for and of his share in the common welfare, and 
of his consequent equal right to be heard and to 
act therein, which cannot be limited to matters 
political, but necessarily extends to all things in 
which the lives of men have common duties and 
interests ; a recognition which is the result of a 
permanent mental and moral habitude. Conse- 
quently, the town-meeting method has dominated 
the procedures of the Anglo-Saxon in all matters 
in which men have occasion to act together. 

And since it is the outgrowth of those innate 
conceptions of the meanings and ends of life and 
of those habits of thought and feeling which 
cover the whole range of associated human ac- 
tivity, whether in fields political, religious, or ma- 
terial, we should naturally expect to see the same 
principles of organization and method governing 
the growth of the later and more complex politi- 
cal organizations required by the growth of the 
interests and the enlargement of the territory 
covered by those activities. And that is what 
we do see. As the towns unite to form states, in 
which direct, individual action in the town has to 
be replaced by the action of its duly chosen and 



lO 



accredited representatives, the town is not there- 
fore nor thereby displaced nor replaced nor re- 
duced in rank, but continues its primal functions ; 
and the operations of the greater political organiz- 
ation are in form and spirit essentially only those 
of the town applied on a larger scale, under 
names significant of the larger interests it deals 
with. This New England of ours in the institu- 
tions of its political, its religious, and its intellec- 
tual life, in the management of its state affairs, of 
its church affairs, and of its schools, is but a vast 
example of the town-meeting principle and meth- 
od, of every community governing itself, applied 
to everything with such variation of detail as pre- 
serves the principle but fits the conveniences of 
the particular interest dealt with. 

And wherever the sons of New England have 
gone to set up civilized life and its institutions in 
this broad domain of ours, and within which they 
are everywhere found, they have carried and es- 
tablished in operation the conceptions, principles, 
and substantial methods in which they were bred 
and which have come down to them in a straight 
line from a time that dates back of written his- 
tory ; back of the time when Caesar's legions fol- 
lowed down the Rhine waters. They have planted 
throughout the great West the ideas and the in- 



stitutions which are, and are to remain, the domi- 
nating and educating ideas and the true nurseries 
of those great hosts of foreign birth who have 
come among us to better their lives, and yet 
more to set their children upon better paths, but 
whose own experience of government elsewhere 
has been largely of the state's power of repres- 
sion and of its excessive control and direction of 
the individual, and whose reactionary conception 
of liberty is too often that of unrestricted license 
as to themselves, with the liberty to dominate all 
over whom they can obtain power. And so, in 
our hopeful confidence in the providence of God 
that no seed of His sowing shall fail of its ap- 
pointed harvest in His sure moving years, we may 
count New England ideas and institutions the 
salt that has saved and, by transforming and as- 
similating them, is to save the now many peoples 
of this land, and make them, at last, one people. 

But while we rightly look out upon the coming 
glory of this large hope, and breathe in its 
heavenly courage, and thank God that by the 
hand of our fathers it has come to us to use for 
the health of our generation and the guidance of 
all those yet to come, by so much as we believe 
the whole future welfare of our country to hinge 
upon the right and unperverted development of 



New England ideas and institutions among our 
great new and as yet unassimilated immigrations, 
are we bound to criticise our own progress, test 
our own loyalty to those ideas, the faithfulness of 
our own administration of those institutions; and 
the more we rejoice in their fruitfulness in the 
past, are we carefully now to note by what fault 
of ours there has been or is like to be any failure 
in their further result for mankind, and to inquire 
what remedy is in our hand for any discovered 
defect or threatened failure of operation. And, 
doing this, we are also bound not to abate one 
jot of heart or hope, but to find our fault and our 
danger, if fault and danger there be, to the end 
that we may frankly, patiently, and steadfastly 
set ourselves to that full remedy for the one 
which is the only defense against the other. For 
God never allows us to escape consequences. 
They are the marks and eternal witnesses by 
which we first distinguish good and evil. 

There is one fault to be recognized and cor- 
rected, and there is one danger to be foreseen and 
guarded against, each of so subtle character as to 
long escape attentive notice, yet of such magni- 
tude that they are worthy the immediate and 
most serious consideration of every right-minded 
and patriotic man. The fault is this: We boast 



13 



— and it is theoretically true — that ours is a 
freedom under law; that ours is a government of 
law and of equal law, with no element of personal 
will, passion, or caprice operative in it ; that it is 
one law for all, bearing on all alike, giving equal 
justice and equal protection to each. Now a 
government of law and of equal law must be, 
not only a government of law equal and uni- 
form in its intended and apparent operation, 
but equal, uniform, and impartial in its actual 
operation; in its execution. There is no govern- 
ment of law — no matter how well the law be 
framed — until the law is executed, until it is 
universally and uniformly operative; and there is 
no freedom, equal justice or protection under law, 
however rightly intended and adjusted, except as 
these are secured by the uniform and certain exe- 
cution of law. And if in the execution of equal 
law there be any element of personal will, passion, 
or caprice in the executive, be he president, gov- 
ernor, or constable, state official, judge, or town 
officer, then so far the government of law fails, 
personal despotism is substituted, the law becomes 
but the tool of the personal will of its executive, 
and freedom under the law and protection by the 
law are destroyed. The operation of the law be- 
comes uncertain and unequal, and is based not on 

14 



the rights and safety of each and of all, but upon 
illegitimate considerations found in the personal 
interests and views of the person set to execute 
its provisions. 

Now I venture to assert that at the present day 
we have an abundance of law. Our statute books 
are crowded with legislation touching the mi- 
nutest details of every conceivable subject; and 
every session of our legislatures finds floods of 
proposed new laws and proposed changes in old 
ones. It is evident in all our states, as in our Con- 
gress, that as a people we believe in law; that is, 
in the efficacy of law in itself to accomplish 
things. We are leaving no detail of life un- 
touched by statute. We are trying to make every 
current of life run in a channel marked out by 
statute law. Every imperfection in public affairs 
and everything that annoys or incommodes us in 
our neighbor's private affairs or in his standards of 
action we seek to remedy by a statute that com- 
mands or forbids something and somebody; and 
the constant failure of the statute to command 
or forbid effectually is witnessed by the constant 
amendment and change of the statutes. And 
what is the secret of the failure ? It is double; it 
is over-legislation on the one hand, and the failure 
to execute law on the other. 



15 



The temptation to over-legislation in a democ- 
racy, confident in the efficacy of law, is very 
powerful. It is so easy for the voter to get the 
member from his town or district, and for whom 
he voted, to introduce a bill embodying his per- 
sonal views, interests, and wishes, but disguised 
by being cast in a general form ; and among the 
great number of members who are untrained and 
inexpert in legislation, it is so difficult for them 
to soundly discriminate among the thousands of 
cleverly drafted measures thrust upon them for 
careful study and judicious action. Unfortun- 
ately, electing a man to the legislature does not 
change his gifts nor give him sound wisdom ; and 
many motives, influences, and pressures come in 
to confuse both the untrained mind and the un- 
accustomed conscience. And designing people, 
knowing these things, easily use the legislative 
power of the people, carelessly placed in such 
hands, to oppress, in the name of the law, those 
against whom their designs run. Every faddist 
seeks thereby to bind a whole people to follow 
his peculiar idea. The political leader seeks 
thereby to conciliate and to punish, and to con- 
solidate his power. Opposing interests seek there- 
by to cripple each other and to take the people 
captive in the net of their own power. And there 

i6 



is no such irresponsible despot on earth as a care- 
less democracy with the full legislative power. 
There are few things against which the people 
need more thoroughly to protect themselves than 
the legislative power of their own representatives. 
But with all our faith in legislation as the cure for 
all ills and the infallible promoter of all righteous- 
ness, we fail wofully in getting our legislation fully, 
equally, and always executed. And both public 
opinion and official conscience are at fault in the 
matter. There seems to be an instinctive sense 
in the whole people that we have gone too far ; 
that we have too many and too complicated laws 
upon too many subjects and in too much detail ; 
that we are experimenting too much, and must go 
tenderly in the enforcement of so much law lest 
we do too much damage. And the man who is 
set to enforce and execute the law finds his task 
a difficult one from its multiplicity, and that it 
bears hardly, as he thinks, upon some number, 
great or small, whose future votes may seem to 
be important to his own political and official 
future, and whom, therefore, he would avoid 
offending. The people as a whole have a strong 
distaste to have any personal share in the enforce- 
ment of law ; and, in committing it to proper 
officials, they wash their hands of any further and 



17 



personal responsibility in respect thereof. They 
cease to be observant and critical of the adminis- 
tration of law by its officers. Those whose 
memory goes back to the conditions existing 
before the civil war will doubtless agree that its 
close marked a distinct change in the attitude of 
the public mind toward the conduct of public 
affairs. The long, exhausting strain of anxiety, 
grief, and loss then found glad relief ; and most 
men turned thankfully to the sole care of their 
own concerns, willing to let who would care for 
those of the public. As after every war, there 
followed a period of weary indifference on the 
one part and an eager grasping of opportunity on 
the other, of demoralization and corruption which 
has by no means passed away, and which mere 
legislation fails to correct. And between the dis- 
taste of the people for any personal concern in 
the matter, their laxity in properly holding the 
officers of the law to account, and the many 
motives which lead the latter to avoid doing un- 
pleasant duty, the law fails to do the good and to 
prevent the evil which was expected of it ; but 
instead of recognizing the main causes of its 
failure, — the attempt to make it do too much, and 
the lack of its thorough execution, — we go again 
and again to the legislatures to get the details 



amended. The truth seems to be that, in the 
general desire of both citizens and officials to 
avoid the disagreeable responsibility for the strict 
and complete execution of law, we are trying to 
pass laws so minute and so elaborate in detail 
that they will execute themselves and relieve us 
of all blame for unpleasant results to offenders. 
The object of our search seems to be an auto- 
matic, self-executing statute that relieves every- 
body of disagreeable responsibility. Certain it is 
that while it is perilously easy to get legislation 
of the most intricate and sweeping character, one 
of our most serious problems is the great and 
growing fault in the right execution of laws 
already made. A single illustration will describe 
the situation : At some time in the past one 
of the states of the Union passed a law relating 
to some matters of public order, of a stringent 
character, which threw upon the constabulary 
forces a large responsibility. The head of the 
police of one of the cities of that state asked the 
commissioners of police for their interpretation 
of the provisions of the law and for their instruc- 
tions, for his guidance as to the extent to which 
it should be carried out by his force. With one 
exception, it was the expressed opinion of the 
members of the board that the recent changes in 

19 



the law were ill-advised, overdone, and, while 
generally obnoxious to the many persons most 
affected thereby, were of doubtful utility to the 
community, and that they should be quietly 
ignored by those who were set to enforce them. 
Such things cannot be without a general lower- 
ing of the tone of public morals, and a loss of con- 
fidence in and of respect for law and lawful order. 
Law that is not executed is ineffectual ; it is the 
inevitable sanction of law which makes its real bond 
on many, perhaps most, consciences ; ineffectual 
law brings the law and the law-making power 
itself into contempt, however active and ingenious 
it may be ; and when law has lost its power, or 
exerts it reluctantly, unequally, irregularly, un- 
fairly, and upon the impulse of uncertain motives, 
men who need its protection feel themselves 
justified and sometimes compelled to take the law 
into their own hands and apply its penalties of 
their own will and outside its orderly methods and 
safeguards; and so public passion, irregular 
violence, disorder, and spasmodic action take the 
place of calm, impartially considerate, careful 
public justice, and we go lapsing back toward that 
state of savagery in which the individual redresses 
his own wrongs by his own standards of judgment 
and his own methods of execution according to 

20 



his power. The law which does not protect is 
replaced by personal revenges or by mob law, 
than which nothing can be more unjust, and in 
which nothing is certain but its unlawful and un- 
restrained cruelty. Under such conditions public 
sentiment, instead of being calm, sober, consider- 
ate, temperate, firm, and reliable, becomes excit- 
able, irritable, explosive, violent, suspicious, un- 
reasoning, and capricious, now absurdly and 
hysterically sympathetic and now inhumanly hard. 
It goes without saying that any failure or weak- 
ness in the operation of law invites crime and all 
wrong doing by the strong against the weak, and 
the vicious against the peaceable. But, moreover, 
our failure to secure the right execution of law 
not only cheats us of its intended effect, but we 
fail to learn what its full, actual effect would be. 
We are losing the invaluable educating force of 
law executed in the spirit of its conception. 

And again, note how surely weakness in the ex- 
ecution of law encourages those whose interests 
lead them to ends and means outside the law, 
which nothing more completely and startlingly 
illustrates than the matter of course readiness with 
which a body of " strikers," for whatever primary 
cause, puts on the form of military organization, 
takes the field, and, defying law, makes war even 



to the death on those who are glad to do the work 
which they refuse for themselves, but forcibly 
prevent others from doing. Are we splitting into 
self-governing, narrow factions that are outside of 
and above the institutions of law and that are to 
war upon and conquer society and its institutions 
whenever these are not subservient to their 
demands ? Are the ancient private wars of feudal 
chiefs and clans to be replaced by the private 
wars of unions upon non-union laborers. Cannot 
the free man give his labor as he pleases, except 
at the peril of his life and the peace of his family 
at the hands of those who dislike the terms for 
themselves ? Is the right of free contract to be 
denied at the behest of men who seek to compel 
contracts by criminal force ? Is a member of an 
organization more than a citizen or a man ? There 
are more guises of anarchy than one; and the 
subtlest and most dangerous of all is that which 
wars upon the whole people in the name of a part 
of the people, and so confuses the minds of many, 
and secures sympathy when it ought to receive 
swift condemnation. And never was true, per- 
sonal freedom and manly liberty, in pure exercise 
and thoroughly protected by the equal law which 
guards every one man as jealously as the many, 
more certainly in question and in peril than in 

22 



- W 



these days when the organized forces of capi- 
tal and labor alike seek to take the whole 
mastery over men, put them in obedient, hostile 
camps, and struggle forthe control of society and 
its resources in their own interest. Can society 
so endure ? Is the man to remain the free man, 
the eternal unit in life that God has made him, or 
is he to be but a cog in a machine ? Will he assert 
himself and make the law alive for his protection, 
or will he faint-heartedly sink and fall ? And if 
he sink, to what level of life shall he come ? 

And this brings us to the great danger, or to 
the form of that great danger, to true personal 
freedom and right responsibility and to high man- 
hood, which is, at least in part, the suggestion of 
those of foreign birth who have brought among 
us an alien political, social, and moral philosophy, 
which again is nourished by the feeble and irregu- 
lar execution of the law and also by our exaggerated 
conception of the power and virtue of law to 
remedy all evils, inequalities, and misfortunes: I 
mean state socialism; state control of all resources, 
enterprises, and means and opportunities of em- 
ployment; and the correlative of that, the state 
control of men in their enterprises and employ- 
ments. 

The genesis of this conception of political, 

23 



L.d^C. 



industrial, and social life seems to be this : Men 
are everywhere becoming more and more con- 
scious of the great facts of human interdependence; 
that the gifts of power and faculty in every one 
man somewhere find their counterpart and oppor- 
tunity for exercise in those needs of other men 
which must be met and supplied by him, while 
he, again, has needs for the supply for which he 
is dependent on the powers and faculties of 
others. And so no man is sufficient to himself 
for a full and normal life. No man can live unto 
himself. God has set human life in one great 
order of mutual service, each serving the other 
with his gift, and each receiving as the reward 
therefor whatever needed service the other can 
render. The natural conception of life in such an 
order is divine in its simplicity and its harmony. 
Each, diligently using his own ability for the 
benefit of those who need its product, earns from 
them that which he needs for himself. Each is 
responsible to God for the right use of his gift ; 
each is responsible for so using his gift for 
others as to rightly earn what help he needs 
from them. That is the true conception of re- 
sponsibility, and of manly and friendly self-help 
in this world of our own necessities and those of 
others; and for life so conceived, full and pro- 



24 



tected liberty, personal freedom, and full account- 
ability are the absolute necessary conditions. 

And the difficulties of free political, industrial, 
and commercial life arise and grow only as men 
forget the first principle and element of that con- 
ception, that he who would be served must also 
serve; that he who would have his reward must 
first fairly earn it ; and, instead of willingly sub- 
mitting to this condition, seek to get service with- 
out giving service, to get a reward without 
earning it. And we are painfully aware that 
many men do so misconceive and misuse their 
freedom. Instead of truly and loyally serving the 
world's need they seek to take advantage of and 
exploit it for their own undue gain ; though we 
must never lose sight of the fact that, even so, 
the economies of the world are so ordered that, 
except for absolute theft and criminal fraud, even 
extortionate gains cannot be had except for some 
degree of service rendered. And because so 
many misuse their liberty of individual enterprise 
and initiative to their own undue advantage and 
the disadvantage of others, and because the cor- 
rective power of the law is weak through its feeble 
execution and its impossible attempts, there are 
those who reason that the true corrective for that 
misuse is in the destruction of individual enter- 



25 



prise, the abolition of the free and unhindered 
exercise of personal talent and bent according to 
opportunity, and the assumption by the state 
of the ownership and control of the great fields of 
industry and endeavor, and the control of each 
man's labor therein. 

This reasoning rests upon two radically false 
propositions. The one is, that because men can 
do, and ought to do freely of their ability, there- 
fore it is right for other men — calling themselves 
the state, as if they were anything but associated 
men — to put all ability under compulsion, lest it 
be not exercised; that because all men can labor 
in some useful wise, and ought to so labor, all 
ought to be made slaves to the state, that none 
may escape labor; that your ability to serve makes 
my right to compel you to serve according to my 
notion of what that service ought to be. The 
second falsity is the idea that the true remedy 
for misused power is its restriction even in right 
use; that it is right, in order to prevent its wrong 
or unfair use by some, to limit and prevent its full, 
proper use by any; that to prevent wrong is the 
full and complete establishment of righteousness; 
that the high, divine possibilities of human nature 
are to be wrought out and the Kingdom of God 
established among men grown into the nature 

26 



and the stature of Jesus Christ, or that men are 
to be brought into that nature and stature, by 
grinding it down to the low, dead level of an 
average of duty and of effort which shears it of its 
best and noblest examples of power and oppor- 
tunity and throws away the highest gifts of God 
to men by preventing their full exercise and by 
withholding His rewards therefor. For we may 
not forget that such reward for duty done is, in 
its kind and its fullest degree, as truly of divine 
appointment and adjustment as is the labor 
which by divine intent, in answering some true 
need, went to earn it; and by so much as we pre- 
vent men from earning according to their full 
capacity, we destroy the primal, normal and divine 
incentive to their best effort. And by so much as 
we limit the normal activities and energies and 
talents of men, do we wholly prevent human de- 
velopment and progress. What society needs and 
what God manifestly intends us to learn in this 
great primary school of His, is, not that we shall 
have our power to act for this world's good taken 
away from us or parcelled out to us by any men 
under any name whatsoever, but that we shall 
learn to act fully, truly, rightly, divinely, and so 
wisely; that we shall learn by the disciplines of 
life, by our errors, by the punishments of our 



27 



sins, by the sincere study of that which He has 
set us to do with Him for the regeneration of the 
world, for bringing all its forces into full, divine 
play, and not to limit, stunt, nor paralyze them. 
To teach and practice men in the right use of 
their powers, is the only remedy for their misuse. 
Collective self-government does not mean the 
rule over each by all the rest; of the despotism of 
a number over one, instead of the despotism of one 
over many. It means the securing to each one, 
and so to all, from and by the power of all, the 
full recognition of all his duties, and the liberty 
necessary to and the fullest reward for their per- 
fect fulfilment. 

We cannot avoid the divine law of full growth 
for all created life : leave to each man and to all 
men in every capacity the freedom and the op- 
portunity to do all right things to the uttermost 
of their powers ; limit and punish only their 
wrongdoing. Let the state do only that which 
men cannot effectively do in any individual or 
private capacity. For states were made for men, 
and not men for states. The state was made to 
allow men to develop in themselves full, perfect, 
and benign personal power ; men were not made 
to be mere parts of its machine or the raw material 
of its mechanical life. And the selfishness which 

28 



leads some men to abuse their gifts of power and 
freedom and opportunity is not cured by the 
substitution of that greater selfishness which 
would make each man the slave of all other men 
by putting his powers under the control, direction, 
and compulsory limitation of the state. Not so 
will the kingdom of good will and free righteous- 
ness come among men. Not by putting the aspir- 
ing, honest, forceful, enterprising, diligent, and 
masterful men at the compulsory service of the 
careless, vicious, designing, indolent, mental and 
moral incompetents of the world, will the latter 
be changed into the better characters of those 
whose services they would buy for a pittance 
by the compulsory power of the state. 

These things are alien to every fibre of Anglo- 
Saxon birth. The lives of our Puritan fathers 
back to the earliest generation, their struggles 
through all history, and their heroic deaths on 
many a field, for the freedom of the whole man- 
hood, give their perpetual, unabating protest to 
the lie that the state, be it a king or a democracy, 
may own and rob the man. And we, sons of the 
men who first subdued our broad domain and 
conquered its political freedom to make it the 
fatherland and home of free men to the latest 
generation, need not forget nor let our sons forget 

29 



by what late sacrifices an enslaved people have 
been made free in our time, and their feet put in 
the forward path where we must lead. 

We speak and hear much of the problems of 
our time, as if they were new and strange and 
based otherwise than were the old. But it is not 
true. Our problems are the problems of every 
time since the fall, — the problems of honesty, 
self-help, and brotherly kindness, under whatever 
changing conditions these elements of character 
need be exercised. 

The philosophy of socialism sums up its creed 
in two items : *' From each according to his 
ability; to each according to his need." The 
first is true ; the second is the gospel of laziness 
and theft, and makes a false appeal to weak senti- 
ment and a merely emotional impulse of the 
charitable instinct of noble minds. The whole 
makes that most elusive and mischievous of all 
false things, the half truth but entire lie. The 
full and precise truth may read : From each 
according to his ability ; to each according to his 
free use of that ability. 

The instinct of our own people in all the past 
has been a sure one. New theories, plausibly 
dressed, may interest the mind ; the misfortunes, 
even the guilty misfortunes, of multitudes who 

30 



have come among us, may and must touch our 
pity and quicken our consciences to search out 
right remedies for themselves to apply ; but we 
shall belie our history and ourselves, and forfeit 
the work given us to do for the world, when we 
drop out of our creed and our practice the article 
that each man is meant of God to be, according 
to the fullness of his gift, the free, willing helper 
of all the need of his time, but the bond servant 
of no form of power among men. 

From a reverently thankful review of what the 
people of our blood have wrought in the past, and 
from a sober recognition of the conditions on whose 
solution hinge the already swinging doors of the 
mighty unknown where our children must enter 
and strive, let us take anew that resolution, 
worthy of our fathers, worthy of our own better 
part, and of that we would see in our children's 
children, which under God shall be the spring of 
our and their high and steadfast action and the 
clear, reviving light of a coming day : that not by 
idle shifts and weak devices that seek to avoid 
evils rather than cure them, will we guide the life 
of the present and strike the paths of the future ; 
but by informing, quickening, and strengthening 
by full, free use, the best in us and in all men ; the 
best of fiber, heart, and brain, the ideally human 



31 



and the truly divine. This, if I read the life of 
man aright, is the great and true lesson of our 
home gathering, the true light from all the glories 
past. And from its grateful memories and in the 
pledge of our own steadfast purpose and hopeful 
courage and trust, we may face expectant toward 
the slow-growing light of the coming of our King 
unto His own. And so may we, the children of 
the fathers and mothers of this town, of whatever 
generation, rightfully and once again dedicate our- 
selves and this dear home of theirs and of ours, 
to the freedom of man, the free service of men 
and the greater glory of God. 



32 



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